Trait and Trace
by illuminata79
Summary: Mick's family gathers for a special celebration.


Although he will probably always remain a thirty- or fortysomething in my mind, Mick would now be a very old gentleman, if he were still alive at all.

We never learn his exact age in the movie, so I have taken the liberty of making 29th October, 1913, his date of birth, which makes today his 100th birthday.

I have tried to imagine what might be happening to mark the occasion, coming up with this story as a little birthday gift to this wonderful character who made me rediscover my knack for writing stories. Thanks for being such a fantastic leading man, Mr. Carpenter.

This piece is as much about Mick as it is about family, which is why I chose this poem to go with it instead of a song:

**_Thomas Hardy: Heredity_**

_I am the family face;  
__Flesh perishes, I live on,  
__Projecting trait and trace  
__Through time to times anon,  
__And leaping from place to place  
__Over oblivion._

_The years-heired feature that can  
__In curve and voice and eye  
__Despise the human span  
__Of durance – that is I;  
__The eternal thing in man,  
__That heeds no call to die._

* * *

_29th October 2013_

I put the last hairpin in its place and check myself critically in the mirror, scowling at my reflection.

A little makeover of my face is definitely in order, I decide and rummage in a messy drawer full of jars and tubes and vials to find what I need to make myself presentable for the guests as best I can.

I don't consider myself particularly pretty. I am rather short, no more than five feet four, rather flat-chested and generally rather on the skinny side, but not in a sporty way, for I am abominably bad at anything that involves more than a very simple level of physical activity.

My nose is long and sharp - I'm living in the hope that this beak will at least make me one of those interesting-looking elderly ladies one day if it isn't doing much for my attractiveness right now in my thirties - while my mouth is wide, with a deep crease beside one corner because I have a funny lopsided way of grinning, and my teeth are regular but not exactly small.

My hair is what I totally hate about myself. It is straight and fine, and its current warm but unspectacular brown isn't even my natural colour. I have unfortunately inherited my father's mousey-looking dirty blond, while my mother has lovely chestnut waves, to say nothing of my cousin Michael's raven-black curls of this thick and full texture that any woman not so richly endowed by nature would kill for.

Also, among his masculine yet delicate features, the prominent family nose doesn't look out of place but perfectly beautiful. Sometimes life just isn't fair.

The only thing I really like about my looks is my eyes, of vivid green flecked with hazel and framed by long dark lashes.

Carpenter eyes, they say.

My uncle and Michael have them, too, and my mother's are more brown than green but also assume this particular golden hue in a certain light.

These eyes, and my deep love for music, are the legacy of a grandfather I've never seen.

Gentle folk music is playing in the background now, a sweet melodious guitar tune from Ross's debut album, while I hurry to apply some pale green eye shadow, hoping the doorbell won't ring before I'm finished painting my face.

I have to confess I'm a little nervous tonight.

I'm not an experienced hostess, and while the traditional family dinner we have every year on this day is nothing fancy, just a small, intimate affair with no more than seven or eight attending, it is the first time that we're meeting at my place, and I'm not sure if I can really do the occasion justice.

For instance, I know that nobody will mind, but still I'm feeling a bit guilty that I have ordered all three courses that will be served tonight from the Italian caterer around the corner.

Normally, it is my mother, a tried and true kitchen artist, who hosts this dinner. I haven't inherited her talent. I don't even manage to arrange food I've bought in a remotely appealing way.

This year, I have offered to pitch in, well aware that I won't quite live up to the high standards she has set, because my father's still in hospital after some extensive vascular surgery, and of course she wants to spend any minute she can spare by his side.

Anyway, I have tried to do my best. I've laid the table with a sea-blue cloth and white linen napkins and my big old-fashioned fake-silver candlestick. I have even scraped together seven identical plates and wine glasses. Some of the cutlery and the water glasses are mismatched, but I hope that little imperfection will pass for one of the charming, quirky features of an artist's household.

Of course there is the framed photograph, too, identical with the one Mom always puts up on the dining-room sideboard on this day.

My own print of the photo has pride of place permanently in a prominent spot of the big bookshelf that takes up an entire wall of my dining/living-room. Today, the picture is flanked by a bunch of white roses in a spherical vase and a tea light flickering in a blue glass holder.

It is a fantastic photo, not one of those horribly stiff, contrived studio portraits but a lovely shot taken by Mom's friend Charlotte, who later became a professional photographer, on a summer holiday she spent with my mother's family by the sea when both were in their late teens.

The ocean is visible in the picture, too. Deep blue water dotted with a few whitecaps forms a gorgeous backdrop to the casual portrait.

His head is slightly turned to one side, and he's gazing pensively into the distance, a man who bears his age well, still handsome and captivating at close to sixty. The wind is ruffling his thick wavy hair, silvered by the years and streaked with a few strands of pure white. His face is all determined lines and angles - sharply beautiful cheekbones and nose, large heavy-lidded eyes under finely arched brows and a sensuous mouth that seems to be about to curve up into a smile any moment. Fine creases radiate from the corners of his eyes, carved by sorrow and laughter alike, or so I believe.

How I wish he could be with us today, on what would have been his hundredth birthday, although my mother was certainly right when she said on the phone a few days ago, "He wouldn't have wanted to live that long. He'd have hated growing old and feeble and watch his generation die out slowly. Dad wasn't the type who'd have enjoyed making the news as the latest centenarian in town."

But even without an actual birthday to celebrate, I love the tradition of gathering in his honour every 29th October that we have been keeping up so faithfully for as long as I can remember.

It may seem a little strange that I'm so attached to this family custom, considering that we are commemorating a man I've never met, but I have always felt a kind of connection with my unknown grandfather. I wonder if that is because he went just a few weeks before I was born.

Even as a young child, I could never hear enough about the man I only knew through photographs and the loving recollections of older family members.

I was generally very intrigued by the weird world that the past was to my child's eyes - I could spend hours and hours rifling through photo albums, giggling about everybody's funny clothes and hairstyles and Aunt Lucy's ridiculous choice of glasses in the seventies and eighties, religiously reciting the names of all those pictured there, trying to reconcile the faces in those old images with their more mature versions that I knew - but I always lingered longest over pictures of the tall, good-looking man named Mick Carpenter, the man I would so have loved to call Grandpa to his face, just once.

My living grandpa, Andrew Taggart, is a kindly, short man with grandfather-ish thinning hair and a wicked sense of humour that seems to be at odds with his sober accountant's appearance, and I love him dearly, but it is the mysterious stranger with the intense face and inscrutable eyes who used to be my childhood hero and fascinates me still.

Where other kids had imaginary friends, I had Grandpa Mick.

Whenever I had been slighted and felt the whole world was against me, it was him I turned to, pouring my heart out to him in conversations conducted in my head and later in the letters I wrote to him in my diary, convinced that he would have been the one person who was on my side, come what may.

When I was a child, my mother seldom managed to speak of him without tearing up, which used to disturb me so much that I didn't often dare ask her to tell me more, but by and by, from what she and my uncle and my grandma told me, a picture formed in my mind of a very sweet and gentle father, of a devoted lover and faithful companion to my grandmother, of a man whose life had been brutally hard at times but who had never given up.

He had lost his parents early on and had been forced to make his way through the world all alone when he was barely twenty years old, a way that had taken him all around the globe as a sailor and on to a tiny South Pacific island where he had worked as a pearl trader and where he one day met Grandma Evelyn.

Mom has a lovely snapshot in her study which shows them sitting in the sand of a tropical beach, her with a notepad open on her knees, him with a woven basket nestled between crossed legs. Grandma once told me that it held some of the pearl shells he'd been diving for. It was a scene of such quiet, intimate harmony that I was in fact a little shocked when I learned as a teenager that Grandma was at the time still married to another man.

The telephone rings when I have just rimmed my left eye in black eyeliner.

I dart across the short corridor to pick it up, and there is Michael's gushy voice in my ear, telling me that there has been a pile-up on the highway and they are stuck in a hell of a traffic jam and he thinks they won't make it before eight.

I sigh and hope the food won't go cold in its thermal containers.

Not a minute later, Mom calls to say there's chaos on the interchange and she has no idea when she's going to be here.

I return to the bathroom and finish touching up my face, then I decide to kill the time until the guests arrive in the most appropriate way: I get out what I call Grandpa Mick's treasure chest.

It is really just an old, much-mended cardboard box, its initial colour hardly recognizable under all the Scotch tape, but when I was a child, it was a genuine treasure to me. I was in heaven every time I was allowed to sift through what it held - a little collection of photographs, an old-fashioned black fountain pen in a dark green leather case, a small sea shell, a folded sheet of the softest gold-flecked tissue paper and a well-thumbed copy of _Treasure Island_ with _Mick Carpenter_ carefully inscribed on the flyleaf in a neat boyish handwriting. The original colour of the ink, most likely black or blue, had turned to brown long ago.

Whenever I visited Grandma, I begged her to get down the box from the top shelf of her bookcase, and on my eighth birthday, my greatest gift wasn't the Barbie in a riding outfit nor the stack of Enid Blyton books or the pretty flower-printed beach towel, not even the blue velveteen dress spangled with glittery little stars that had been my biggest wish.

It was when Grandma produced the battered cardboard box, adorned with a fat green bow, that I grew all silent with wonder and only managed to whisper a soft and shaken "Ooooh". I think it must have been the first time in my life that I felt so overwhelmed with happiness that I wanted to weep.

Feeling much like that awestruck little girl, I open the lid of the box now, but before I start digging into its contents, I lean over and select a different album on my iPod – another guitar, Johnny Cash's distinctive dark voice, a song whose lyrics that make me think of him every time.

_I have been a rover  
__I have walked alone  
__Hiked a thousand highways  
__Never found a home_

There is indeed something lonesome about my grandfather, especially in those photos that show him as a very young man. He is strikingly handsome, and you'd imagine all the girls must have been at his feet, only that there's something guarded and vulnerable in his eyes, a sensitivity about his mouth that isn't showing any more in his older self, that makes me think he wasn't the flirty type in his youth.

_Still in all I'm happy  
__The reason is, you see  
__Once in a while, along the way  
__Love's been good to me_

The chorus of the song makes me look for one snapshot that touches me particularly.

It must have been taken soon after his tour of duty in the Pacific, as he is very thin and his hair much shorter than in any other photo I have seen of him. He is on crutches because he has lost most of his right leg in the war and hasn't yet learned to use an artificial limb. He is leaning quite heavily into the wooden supports, but there is something heartening in the determination with which he keeps himself as upright as he possibly can, and something infinitely tender and loving in the way he smiles at Grandma and her camera from across a rose bush in full bloom, something that makes even my cynical 21st century self believe there may be some truth to the old adage _Love conquers all._

I browse through the rest of the photographs, handling them very carefully, those brittle relics from another age with their white serrated edges and sepia colouring, immersing myself in each of those moments from my grandfather's life, glad that they have been preserved on paper for me to study decades and decades later.

Here is the one depicting him at a rough wooden table, weighing and measuring his pearls, a big ledger open beside him, a look of stern concentration on his face, a cloud of smoke from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth dispersing around his head like a halo as he peers at the old-fashioned set of scales dangling from his hand.

Next is what I call the "movie-star pic". He is sitting outside a primitive kind of hut, gorgeous in all his shirtless broad-shouldered glory, again with a cigarette stuck between his lips, eyes narrowed in a fashion that reminds me of those film stars of old, the classy, ravishing kind they don't seem to make any more nowadays. Gregory Peck maybe, or Richard Burton, starring in an exotic adventurer's romance. Something like my grandparents' own love story, which is amazing enough to rival some of the best movie scripts.

A sepia-tinted, relatively large print shows a somewhat enigmatic-looking piano player in rolled-up shirtsleeves, a dramatically beautiful profile worthy of any Byronic hero and a mane of black curls that would have left many a '70s rock star green with envy. Grandma told me that there was a time when he earned his living by playing the piano in a bar, a thought I have always found utterly romantic, although it probably was anything but.

Now there's just one picture of him left in the stack, a very young Mick in dark dress pants and waistcoat and a white shirt, kneeling in the grass of what seems to be a well-tended garden, his arms around two little girls who are as dissimilar in their looks as their attire is identical, white lace-trimmed dresses and little patent-leather shoes with ankle straps and white frilly socks. Grandpa's little sisters.

The taller one is thin and wiry, and although she can't be much older than six or seven, she clearly bears a great resemblance to her older brother around the eyes and mouth. The younger girl appears to have a totally different set of genes, she is short and rotund with angelic fair curls and this sort of round apple-like baby cheeks that make you want to pinch and kiss them. From the way they cuddle up to him and their enchanted smiles, both girls obviously adore their big brother.

How I wish I could have snuggled up to the older version of the tall youth pictured here on the verge of manhood. It is safe to assume I'd have been just as blissfully happy as these two little cuties.

One last photo remains, printed on thick, almost cardboard-like paper.

At first glance, the man looks like him but the face is narrower and the hair is wrong, thick and dark, too, but parted on one side and combed back from his forehead in a sweeping wave. His eyes sparkle with untypical, insouciant exuberance as he proudly faces the camera in his wedding suit next to his tiny bride, shy and pretty in a simple but well-cut dress and a thin veil with a circlet of pale rosebuds above the brow. _Alice and Henry, __August 17th, 1912_ is written on the back in a neat old-fashioned longhand.

My great-grandparents' wedding day.

The dashing bridegroom might well be older than his twenty years, judging from his posture and build, a self-confident young man who clearly knows what he wants from life, but my great-grandmother doesn't look a day past the eighteen she is. A frightfully young bride to my modern mind.

Equally frightful is the thought that this young girl was still not out of her teens when she gave birth to her first child, exactly a hundred years ago today.

What an utterly different world her baby was born into, I can't help thinking.

A world where automobiles and telephones were scary newfangled contraptions, toys for the rich at best, the notion of their becoming as affordable and ubiquitous as they are nowadays an inconceivable utopia.

No radio, no television, no computers; modern comforts like electricity and running water still quite unusual in more rural places.

Two world wars still unfought, antibiotics as undiscovered yet as nuclear fusion or the structure of DNA.

A cruel time when many children didn't live to see their tenth birthday, many mothers died in childbirth for want of a doctor or of the means of taking them to the nearest hospital quickly enough.

I can't help but wonder under what circumstances Michael John Henry Carpenter had seen the light of day.

* * *

_Maine, 29__th__ October 1913_

Henry was pacing outside the house nervously, his hands buried deep inside the pockets of his coat.

It was a clear, crisp night with all the stars out and a cold white moon high up in the blackness of the sky, a stark and impressive sight, but Henry had no eye for its beauty.

All he could think of was Alice and the ordeal she was going through, in the small bedroom he had been banished from long before.

Her mother was with her, and Theodora Kendall, the midwife. The sturdy grey-haired woman who had seen countless village babies being born, including Alice herself, had sent him away, disregardful of his desperate wish to stay and somehow ease his beloved's pain, his yearning to be with her and help her through whatever was necessary to bring their baby into this world.

He had been looking forward to becoming a father in a rather naïve way, picturing a chubby little boy or girl to cuddle and bounce on his knee, to laugh and sing and play with, never thinking much about the actual delivery of the child.

When Alice's face had contorted with the first fierce contractions and she asked him in a small voice to go get her mother, he had been seized by a terrible fear that something was wrong. He had jumped onto his bicycle and pedaled across the village at breakneck speed, hating to leave his wife alone in that state she was in.

When she answered his frantic hammering on the door, Mary had remained inexplicably calm and almost appeared happy. She wrapped herself into her coat and said she'd fetch the midwife and come to their home as soon as she could.

About an hour later, Alice had gone to lie down on the bed and was gasping out in pain with unnerving regularity.

Her mother had only said, "Good, that's good, it's going ahead", while the midwife impassively timed the intervals between contractions.

They had already wanted him out at that point, but he had refused to go.

He sat helplessly next to his wife, marveling at the absurdly big bulge beneath the cotton shift she wore, wondering if the child in there wasn't way too large for such a dainty woman, held her hand as she tried to breathe easy and moaned softly from time to time.

He cursed himself bitterly for persuading her right after the wedding that they should start a family very soon, and that it should be a large one, too. He had been over the moon when she told him they had successfully taken the first step on the road that might lead to a whole bunch of little Carpenters. If only he had known then …

"Ohhh", Alice whispered suddenly, and he was horrified to see a dark stain rapidly spreading on the brown sheets below her hips.

He closed his eyes. She was bleeding to death, and it was all his fault. It was all he could do to stifle a distraught sob.

"Fine, the waters have broken", Theodora said evenly and, with a disdainful glance at the pallid face of the father-to-be, added, "Are you alright, Henry? I think you need some fresh air. It won't be long until the baby's born. Go and take a walk or dig over the garden or whatever, but please leave us alone. This is really no place for a man to be now."

That had been five hours ago, and he had not dared defy Theodora's stern orders, although it was killing him not to know how the situation was developing in the bedroom.

At first, he had gone into his small tailor's workshop downstairs and tried to work on the skirt he was making for Dr. Phillips's wife, but he found he simply could not concentrate with Alice's moans and cries in the background. Loath to spoil the expensive fabric that had been so hard to come by, he decided to put it all off until after the baby was born.

Alice's father had dropped by upon returning from his boat to see how things were going, and a chat with him had taken Henry's mind off his worries a bit, but when John left to do some repairs at home, he had begun marching up and down the tiny garden, imploring the heavens to keep Alice and the baby safe, trying to maintain a grip on himself, picking nervously at the dry leaves of a hazel bush.

The creaking of the small garden gate startled him, and he whirled round.

"Any news?"

His father-in-law was back, his pipe a reddish glow in the dark as he puffed on it.

Henry shook his head, shredding a fistful of hazel leaves to minuscule pieces in his hand. "I wish there was something I could do", he said miserably.

John patted him on the shoulder. "Leave that to the ladies, mate. Alice's a tough little thing, she'll do fine, I'm sure. Can't be long now until you get to see your son."

"Or daughter", Henry said.

"Nah, the firstborn had better be a boy", John declared. "A man's gotta keep up the family name!"

Henry didn't reply. He didn't care if it was a boy or a girl, if only mother and child were alive and well when all was over.

Both men were staring at the moon in silence when the front door opened and Mary came rushing outside to grab Henry's hand in great excitement. "You've got a little boy, Henry! A big strapping lad, well over seven pounds, and he's got lots of black hair and a voice that rattles the walls. Alice is fine, too. A little worn out but very happy."

Henry felt all faint with relief and stumbled into the house on wobbly legs.

At the bedroom door, he bumped into Theodora, who was carrying a bundle of soiled sheets and gruffly congratulated him on his son.

Alice was glowing with joy despite her obvious exhaustion.

She smiled her lovely quiet smile when he entered and sat down to kiss her gently on the cheek before he proceeded to admire the new arrival. She held the child tenderly in her arm as he slept off the strain of being born, his face still red and a little squashed, his incredibly small hands curled into fists at his chest.

"Hey there", Henry said in a low voice, stroked a smooth plump cheek and a perfect little hand and felt a wild rush of love for the tiny creature as the baby smacked his lips sleepily and closed his fingers around his father's thumb.

"Hello, little one", he whispered in a choked voice. "Hello, Michael."

"Mick", Alice said softly. "I think we'll be calling him Mick."

* * *

The doorbell startles me out of my musing over the wedding picture and times long past.

I put it back into the box and get up to open the door. Michael locks me into a bear hug on the spot while the rest of the family are not quite finished tumbling out of the car, stretching cramped limbs and straightening out clothes.

When I have freed myself, arguing he couldn't possibly want to crush the hostess before he gets his dinner, he asks with glittering eyes and a fake British upper-class accent, "Whom have I the pleasure of meeting today? Araminta? Dorabella? Floralisa?"

I will never hear the end of how I always wanted us to bear fanciful (and usually quite horrible) names when we were playing together as kids, pretending we were a king and queen or at least some lord and lady.

"I thought Octavia would be nice today", I reply with a blasé attitude, trying hard not to giggle. "Unless you think Philomena suits me better, Sir Horatio. Or would you prefer Lord Archibald this evening?"

_"Archibald?"_ He cracks up instantly, and by the time his parents and the girls have joined us, we are both shaking with one of our famous laughing fits.

I couldn't be closer to a brother than I am to Michael, although we are so different in almost everything and don't get to see much of each other any more since both of us left home to go to college over a decade ago. But whenever we do meet, this precious familiarity makes itself felt instantly, as it does now.

My aunt watches our antics in somewhat embarrassed silence, while Lisa, Michael's girlfriend, smiles diffidently and his sister Julia rolls her eyes but says good-naturedly, "The two of you will never change, huh?"

Uncle Paul approaches, a large box wrapped in colourful paper tucked under his arm, and hugs me to his unoccupied side before he hands me the gift. "Just a little something for you, Katie. Thanks for saving the day and inviting us over."

Mom arrives not much later, and once they are all gathered around my table and Uncle Paul is popping the corks of the two bottles of champagne he has also brought along, there is a warm and tender feeling of love and gratitude welling up in me.

I am happy and thankful that we all get on so well with each other, that there are no petty jealousies and rivalries, no going behind each other's backs in our small family. This certainly doesn't mean we always agree, but we have never fallen out completely over anything, as we all feel that we belong together, that we are united by a special bond that keeps us close to each other in our hearts even if we are physically separated.

I daresay both my grandparents would be proud of us.

I look about and recognize Grandma's colouring in Julia's red hair and fair skin, her voice in my mother's, her quick wit in Michael's funny bone-dry repartees, her interest in history in myself.

And, of course, there's a bit of Grandpa Mick in all of us. Julia has inherited his long slender hands and feet, while the rest of us all have his hazel-green eyes with long black lashes and somewhat heavy lids. I have his passion for music, Mom his love for good stories, Michael his appetite for physical activity and outdoorsy stuff.

Uncle Paul generally resembles his father a lot, only that he's a good deal heavier and his hair is a few shades lighter, a rich brown tinged with my grandma's copper and now additionally flecked with grey.

Michael, however, is the spitting image of his namesake at the same age. He looks so much like our grandpa in these old pictures that it is almost scary. He's tall and lean and nicely muscled, but not ridiculously so, and almost absurdly handsome with his mop of black curls and sexy designer stubble. He's fabulous at all kinds of sports, and clever into the bargain. Just like the first Michael Carpenter was, for all I know.

I love how all these traits of his, big and small, live on in us so that, in a way, he is still here with us on this special day.

Uncle Paul pours the bubbly into the random assortment of stemware I have quickly dug up from the depths of my cupboard, and when we all hold a full glass in our hands, he says solemnly, "To the health of all of us. And to absent friends, in memory still bright, as they say. One in particular, of course. I like to think that he's watching us today, and that he is proud of what he sees."

I clink glasses with the others and then, while they are all chatting animatedly, turn and raise my jumble-sale cut-crystal flute to the portrait in the bookshelf, whispering under my breath, "Happy birthday, Grandpa Mick."

He almost-smiles back at me, forever windswept, mysterious and beautiful in his narrow silver frame.


End file.
